Blog | Methoden

Olena Kononenko has been a guest researcher at the CRC 1265 since mid-May 2022. With Lucie Bernroider and Sarah Etz, she spoke about Kyjiw’s past, present and future, similarities and differences between Kyjiw and Berlin, her experiences at the CRC 1265 and her hopes for future returns – to both Kyjiw and Berlin.

This blog post shows that the Covid-19 pandemic and contact restrictions changed the how and where of exchanging social support with others shifting increasingly to the digital. This may be in part a result of the Berliners’ attempt to create a new private outside. Krüger et al. argue, however, that this new private relies on an illusio of privacy. Especially during the pandemic, they hold, our worries might have become “surplus value” in an unregulated and intransparent market of data on and by us.

Idealised values of common identification and consensus often attributed to urban neighbourhoods are romanticised, transfiguring and problematic. The socio-spatial construct of the neighbourhood is constituted not only by what we have in common and what we share, but also by dissent and conflict. We argue that conflict is not to be seen as deficient but can rather be constitutive and, in some cases, even productive for the socio-spatial (re)production of urban neighbourhoods. A research design that combines theory on social negotiations, rules and conventions in the public sphere with critical mapping techniques based on workshops conducted in the field helps to analyse the ambivalent role of conflicts in Berlin-Neukölln.

Izidora, a so-called “informal” settlement in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, is a laboratory of urban politics and sustainable urbanization technologies. As a self-constructed neighbourhood, it is marked by inequalities as well as conflicts with the municipal authorities. In this text, I portray the politics of Izidora’s dwellers, as they appropriate different agroecological practices, enmesh them in their struggle for housing and citizenship, and pursue an emancipatory logic of urban planning. Activist coalitions with intersectional agendas and political articulations of alternative forms of urban agriculture in Belo Horizonte’s peripheries have led to the creation of Izidora, as well as an array of new urban imaginaries. This text is about Izidora and the politics of a city in the making.

With the Covid-19 pandemic touching all parts of life, academic research has not been an exception. Even for researchers who are able to maintain access to their field – for instance, through online research – considerable changes in the objects of study force them to rethink their research questions and study designs as they go along. The team behind CRC project B05 “Translocal Networks” reflects on their experiences of conducting a survey of intense Twitter users at the height of the first Covid-19 wave in Jerusalem.

From October 2019 till February 2020 Letteria G. Fassari was Visiting Fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre 1265. In this interview conducted at the end of her stay, she gives insights into her time at the CRC and her impressions of the city of Berlin.

Eric Lettkemann berichtet über die Hintergründe einer Forschungsreise des SFB-Teilprojekts B04 nach Japan und über die methodischen Herausforderungen, mit denen das Projektteam vor Ort konfrontiert war. Mit der kulinarisch-fokussierten Auto-Ethnografie schlägt er einen augenzwinkernden Weg vor, diese Herausforderungen zu bewältigen.

The following discussion is an edited, abridged transcript of the concluding panel discussion of the 1st International Conference of the CRC 1265 "Re-Figuration of Spaces" on the topic of interdisciplinarity in spatial research between researchers Martina Löw (Chair), Matthias Middell, Ilse Helbrecht, Séverine Marguin, Jörg Stollmann and Steffen Mau.